Ad Campaigns
Titus Upputuru stars in Hideous Luxury Leather’s new campaign
Mumbai: Hideous Luxury Leather Bags, founded by Daniel Upputuru, believes that all things in life are in an imperfect state of flux. The brand thus does strive not for perfection, but aims for excellence instead. The brand believes that the bags must be made from a hide which had all the wear and tear of a life well lived, ingrained on it, telling us a story, a story about scars, scars that make each of us beautiful. The aesthetic is as one of appreciating beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete in nature.
The new film by Hideous titled ‘Baggage’ shows a man ordering a seagull sandwich at a restaurant and sobbing uncontrollably upon seeing it on the table. The waiter who served it to him notices and gets curious. The senior waiter explains to him that the man had mysteriously lost his little son in an island. At night, some tribals fed the man some meat. When the man enquired, the tribals told him it was seagull meat. When the man returned alone to the city, he ordered a seagull sandwich. When he tasted it, he realised that the meat tasted very different from the meat he had at the island. The young waiter concluded, to his horror, that the father had unwittingly eaten his own son. In the end we see the father trying to empty his guts in the washroom, standing by a pool at night contemplating suicide, playing hide and seek and walking his imaginary son home. The film ends with the super, ‘We are all carrying some baggage.’
The film features the exclusive Green Tote Bag, delicately fashioned with hand in full grain leather.
Speaking on the occasion, Hideous brand’s founder Daniel Upputuru said “As we went through the skins, the small marks on them fascinated us, made us ponder on how absolutely beautiful leather is. It reminded us of the Japanese process of pottery called Kintsugi, which gave a unique character, almost a personality to the pieces of art. We realised that there can be an element of hideous in beauty. It was a cathartic experience, we fell in love with the art.”
“The full grain leather is always changing, it breathes, guarantees toughness and longevity. The process of creating each Hideous bag is itself very strenuous. After acquiring the full grain leather, the strength of various threads, the grammage of each thread, the number of stitches per inch is looked into. We also discovered the incredible strength of the Gattermann thread. Every Hideous bag is out of hand-picked full grain leather chosen from hundreds of hides, stitched with loving experienced hands, using strong German threads and following very high standards. When I heard the idea the line that we all have some baggage, I absolutely loved it!” He added.
Titus Upputuru, director of the film, who also acted in the film, added, “Leather, like human skin, is made of wrinkles, scars, and all sorts of imperfect things. As we started thinking about the brand story, we stumbled upon the idea of baggage and how each of us carry some baggage. Now baggage is valuable because it’s part of the human experience. Sometimes it’s so hard to deal with. And the bag that we carry is a metaphor of all that we carry within ourselves. The film depicts a man who is carrying baggage that he finds hard to relinquish. It’s attached to him, like a glove. Scars are part of the brand architecture and we decided to tell a story that had a deep scar ingrained in it.”
The campaign is running across digital platforms.
To know more about the brand or to view the products, please log in to website of Hideous: hideous.in.
NATIONAL: Amazon Ads has laid out a sharply tech-led vision for the advertising industry in 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence, streaming TV and creator partnerships will combine to turn brand building into a more precise, performance-driven business.
At the heart of the shift, the company says, is the fusion of AI with Amazon’s vast trove of shopping, browsing and streaming signals, allowing advertisers to move beyond blunt reach metrics to campaigns designed around real customer behaviour.
“The future of advertising is not about reaching more people, but the right people with messages that resonate,” said Amazon Ads India head and vice president Girish Prabhu. “By combining AI with deep customer insights, we help brands move from broadcasting campaigns to having meaningful conversations wherever audiences spend their time.”
One of the biggest changes, according to Amazon Ads, will be the collapse of the wall between media planning and creative development. Retail media, powered by first-party data, is increasingly shaping everything from brand discovery to final purchase, pushing marketers to design campaigns around audience insight rather than internal instinct.
AI is also moving from a support tool to a creative engine. Agentic AI, which automates and accelerates production, is expected to make high-quality creative accessible even to small businesses, compressing weeks of work into hours and giving challengers the ability to compete with larger brands on speed and scale.
Behind the scenes, AI-driven analytics will take on a bigger role in campaign optimisation, identifying patterns, spotting opportunities and recommending actions that would previously have required teams of analysts.
Streaming TV is another big battleground. With India’s video streaming audience now above 600 million and connected TV users at 129.2 million in 2025, advertisers are set to treat streaming not just as a branding channel but as a performance engine, measured increasingly by sales, sign-ups and bookings rather than just reach.
Finally, Amazon Ads sees creators and contextual advertising reshaping how brands tell stories. Creators will act less like influencers and more like long-term partners, while scene-aware ads on streaming platforms will allow brands to insert hyper-relevant offers into the flow of what viewers are watching.
Taken together, Amazon Ads argues, these shifts mark a move towards advertising that is both more human and more measurable, where AI handles the complexity, and creativity does the persuading.
